If this were 1951, American families would be bracing right now
for another summer of the polio terror.

Those younger than say, 55, may not be able to relate. The worst
scare we’ve had these days is waiting ten hours in line for a
shot for a swine flu plague that never came (though an estimated
1,282 children across the country did
succumb to the H1N1 virus from 2009-2010).

Polio, on the other hand, killed 12,187 American children from
1950 to 1960 and left countless others living in the dreaded
iron lung, or with lifelong paralysis.

By then, polio epidemics were second only to the
atomic bomb in surveys of what Americans feared most. Bomb and
virus alike were terrible agents of destruction that might arrive at
any moment to devastate a family, a community, or an entire nation.
The disease seemed like an omnipresent threat, and its cure became a
national responsibility.

A national responsibility. We certainly marshaled, and
when Jonas Salk was able to perfect a vaccine and then Albert Sabin
came up with an oral dosage, the U.S. was able to wipe polio off its
map. In 1988 a major international effort was able to the same for
the developing world.

How ironic that it’s our Global War on Terror that
threatens to undo our global intentions to eradicate deadly
infectious diseases. We’re talking about Pakistan, which,
according to the World Health Organization, is
teetering on a polio crisis (yes, in 2012), and our U.S.
counterterrorism effort has just now given it a great big push in
the wrong direction.

Afridi was used to set up a phony
public immunization campaign in Abbottabad so he could collect
DNA samples the CIA had hoped would confirm the location of bin
Laden’s people. According to The
New York Times, “American officials have said that
although Dr. Afridi never gained DNA samples from the compound, his
work aided the mission that led to Bin Laden’s death.”
Well and good, but now Pakistanis believe every public health
screening and vaccination program is a CIA-backed connivance, and
they are staying away at the expense of decades of polio eradication
efforts.

On March 2,The
Guardian reprinted in part a letter from InterAction, a
coalition of several international aid groups to CIA Director David
Petraeus:

The
CIA’s use of the cover of humanitarian activity for this purpose
casts doubt on the intentions and integrity of all humanitarian
actors in Pakistan, thereby undermining the international
humanitarian community’s efforts to eradicate polio, provide
critical health services, and extend life-saving assistance during
times of crisis like the floods seen in Pakistan over the last two
years.

“Nigeria has struggled with polio control since 2003, when
a group of imams in the country’s Islamic north declared the vaccine
was deliberately contaminated with either HIV or contraceptives, the
result of an alleged CIA campaign to wipe out Muslim children,”
Garrett wrote. “The conspiratorial view of polio control was
shared by some imams and Muslim politicians in Pakistan and
Afghanistan.”

“So last July, when it was disclosed that the CIA had used
Afridi and a false vaccination campaign to gain access to the
Abbottabad complex, I co-authored a warning
with Dr. Orin Levine that the CIA had ‘destroyed credibility
that wasn’t its to erode.’ We wrote: ‘It was the very
trust that communities worldwide have in immunization programs that
made vaccinations an appealing ruse. But intelligence officials
imprudently burned bridges that took years for health workers to
build.'”

Our U.S. leaders like to say how Pakistan has let us down, but
the truth is we have used them just as they have used us. It’s
the nature of the game. But having dropped our bombs and inserted
our military
(and para-military)
and intelligence agents on their soil, our exploitation leaves a
much more potent legacy, and extends to a civilian population
already wracked by extreme poverty
and illiteracy.

There is nothing resembling our health care system in Pakistan.
Consider the story of honors student Kamran Khan 13, who
set himself on fire and died in Pakistan in March. Reports
indicate that he was ashamed his family could not afford the school
uniform and that he had fought bitterly with his mother, a maid, who
had given up a baby girl two years before because the family could
not afford her. Sadder yet, is that his mother could not pay to tend
to his badly burned body, and he died a few days later without
assistance.

[Shahnaz] Bibi collected donations and took her burned son in a relative’s
car to two hospitals in Peshawar — but one would not admit
him, and the other did not have a burn unit. She then took the boy
to a military hospital with a burn center in the town of Kharian in
Punjab province.

She
said the hospital wanted 500,000 rupees, or about $5,500, to treat
Kamran — a sum impossibly beyond her reach. By then, Kamran
was near death.

The
mother ended up selling her gold earrings to pay for an ambulance to
transport her son’s body back to their home town for burial.

One
could only imagine how poor polio-wracked children in Pakistan
gulping for air, or paralyzed for life, would be treated by this
Darwinian health care system. Men and women in their 60s in America
are
still living in iron lungs today — do you think the Pakistani
people, 60 percent of whom are living
on less than $2 a day, could invest even a fraction of those
health care costs over time?

Dr. Afridi might have thought he was doing his duty by helping to catch
Osama bin Laden (which is exactly how
Washington portrays the relationship, though reports indicate he did
not know who the CIA was targeting at the time). But did Afridi know
of Washington’s nasty habit of leaving those who help us
behind, often to face the horrific consequences alone?

Take
the tale of our Iraqi translators and informants. “Thousands
… who worked for now-departed American troops live in fear”
of retribution in Iraq, according to reports. They are waiting for a
way out. Many former U.S. soldiers have petitioned hard to get them
asylum. Some finally managed to squeeze through a brief window of
opportunity between 2008 and 2010. But
that spigot has closed, according to reports, thanks to two fool
Iraqi immigrants who were fingered inside the U.S. for allegedly
plotting to send weapons and cash to al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2010.

Now,
immigration advocates are telling Iraqis seeking entry into the U.S.
that “the urgency is lost” and “not to count on
America,” according to a USA
Today report in
March.

In 2007, New Yorker writer George Packer traveled through
Iraq and several refugee camps in neighboring countries and became
disillusioned by what he saw as a “betrayal” of Iraqis
who once worked as translators for the American cause. He penned a
play called simply, “Betrayed,” which has since been
performed at theaters nationwide.

“They had no one to defend them,”
Packer
said before a June 2011 run at Stanford University.
“They didn’t have their own militia. They didn’t
have the Iraqi military police, who often thought of them as
traitors. And they didn’t have the Americans. Individual
Americans cared, but institutionally, the U.S. government was
washing their hands of this terrible problem.”

Children with polio in Sierra Leone (courtesy of the World Health Organization)

So far, Congress has reacted to the tale
of Dr. Afridi with anger over his jailing and the Senate
Appropriations Committee has even moved
to slash its foreign aid to Pakistan by $33 million
– one million for each year of his sentence. Meanwhile, Rep.
Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif.., has
introduced legislation that would
accelerate efforts to get Afridi released from jail, give him U.S.
citizenship and award him the Congressional Gold Medal.

It’d be hard to say Afridi didn’t get a raw deal: his court proceedings appear unfair and stacked against
him (strangely, the official charge is he associated with a militant
group, which his family denies) and
until last week, he hadn’t spoken to
his family in a year. U.S. officials say they’ve been working
“quietly” behind the scenes for a lower sentence or even
release. Question is, if he were such a hero, why wasn’t more
done for him in the first place?

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, 76, Lindsay Graham,
56, Richard Durbin, 67, and John McCain, 75, all children of the
polio era, have all made fervent declarations in Afridi’s
defense, but they never once question the ethics and wisdom of
paying a local doctor to set up a pretextual hepatitis B vaccination
drive among a populace already piqued by conspiracy theories and
mistrust.

In fact, if
you listen to the entire webcast of the
Senate committee hearing where the aid was cut, the only time the
vaccination program is mentioned at all is when Feinstein says
Afridi “is not a spy,” and that he was running a
“bona fide immunization program.” Not true,
according to reports. And Graham even goes
so far to say the doctor made Pakistan “safer.”

Today, stories of the “dreaded crippler” in the U.S.
are like nuggets of history, summer campfire stories. In Pakistan it
is a reality and it may be getting worse. Everywhere.

More from Laurie Garrett: “With millions of children in India and some other
countries now experiencing waning immunity, time is decidedly
against us,” she wrote. “If wild polio hasn’t been eliminated from the final three
countries by the end of 2012, the virus could well resurge in sites
of alleged eradication, all over the world. And thousands will
suffer.”

201204045311 Responseshttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2Fvlahos%2F2012%2F06%2F11%2Fthe-cia-and-polio-in-pakistan%2FThe+CIA+and+Polio+in+Pakistan2012-06-12+06%3A00%3A16Kelley+B.+Vlahoshttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2F%3Fp%3D2012040453 to “The CIA and Polio in Pakistan”

So the US 'got' ex CIA asset bin Laden, and the Pakistani military being pissed at one more violation of their sovereignty have jailed ex CIA asset Shakil Afridi in a tit for tat response.
Reading James Risen's 'State of War' it was interesting to learn that the CIA prior to the GWOT was an agency without a mission, even for a short period latching onto anthropogenic climate change as a reason to exist.
Meanwhile Laurie Garrett's warnings will likely go unheeded. A predictable consequence of the new austerity is the return of nutrient deficiency diseases such as rickets, but this is obviously considered acceptable…. http://www.uhs.nhs.uk/AboutTheTrust/Newsandpublic…

The tone of this article is a little over the top for me. Ms. Vlahos is making the claim that polio is going to spread (and has already begun to spread) because one man lied in order to find Bin Laden.

Ms. Vlahos you have laid the blame of supersitious fear caused by super concervative imams on the USA. Has the USA done harmful things in the world: yes. Did Dr. Bibi harm some of the good will created by health workers: yes. Can you lay the entirety or even the majority of this problem on the US? Of course not.

This is more of an issue of an extreme religion leading people to do something that is against their, and the world's, best interests. The extremist imams who are preaching against medicine and the USA were making their false arguments before Dr. Bini came to light. Yes their lies about all health workers being the hands of the USA will have 1 anecdotal piece of strength now, but let's be honest: people already believed their religious leaders before.

Ms Vlahos you completely left out the greatest failure of health workers (as reported in the Laurie Garret article) which was not sending out all female teams to vaccinate children. According to the Garret article THAT was the number one leading cause of complaint from those polled concerning their unwillingness to accept the medicine.

Your writing is supberb and your sources are wonderful, but your seemingly anti-american bias and your complete overlooking of the religious aspect of this story leaves a lot to be desired.

"Well and good, but now Pakistanis believe every public health screening and vaccination program is a CIA-backed connivance, and they are staying away at the expense of decades of polio eradication efforts."

Is it possible this is a war crime?

Using e.g. Red Cross-marked vehicles for military transport is, IIRC, a war crime, and this is similar.

Giving this Pakistani traitor the benefit of the doubt is naive.We are bribers of the first rank,and he,like many of his countrymen seem to be bribees of the first rank.A match made in neolibcon heaven,and a symbol of our rotten times.

Using vaccination and other health programs to bootleg intelligence operations is troubling and will likely have long term serious consequences. These programs are now suspect and legitimate targets in war.
As for those who cheer all vaccinations, I invite you read about the Rockefeller Foundation's plan to use vaccination programs to promote their agenda of depopulation. Or take in Bill Gates infamous TED lecture where he talks "successful" vaccination and other "reproductive health" programs reducing the human population by 15 percent.

Read Dr Mary's Monkey by Ed Haslam. He says the mad rush to create a polio vaccine exposed tens of millions of Americans to cancer causing viruses and could very well be the source of AIDS.

According to CDC statistics, the polio epidemic started in 1943, the YEAR AFTER anti-biotics were introduced into clinical medicine. Is there a causal connection here?

"The fear" was a carefully orchestrated PR campaign to present the polio vaccine as the only alternative available to the American public, while restricting the use of anti-biotics was never even discussed publicly.

And Salk did not "perfect" his vaccine. In fact, his vaccine backfired upon launch, causing The Cutter Incident which killed children, and was withdrawn from use after three weeks or so. Sabin's vaccine followed after a six month hiatus with no vaccine. Sabin's vaccine was originally injected and later administered orally in the form a sugar cube. Both were grown on monkey kidney cells.

America is now in the middle of a cancer epidemic which is 15 to 20 times the size of the polio epidemic at its height. Is this cancer epidemic caused by SV-40, the cancer-causing monkey virus that contaminated both the Salk and Sabin vaccines from 1955 to 1963?

May I point out that the acts in question DO arguably constitute a war crime. In my opinion, this "faux vaccine" scheme indeed violated Article 37 of the 1977 Protocol (Additional to the 1949 Geneva Conventions), which states: It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy. Acts inviting the confidence of an adversary to lead him to believe that he is entitled to, or is obliged to accord, protection under the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, with intent to betray that confidence, shall constitute perfidy. The following are examples:(a) The feigning of an intent to negotiate under a flag of truce or of a surrender

(b) The feigning of an incapacitation by wounds or sickness; (c) The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status; and (d) The feigning of protected status by the use of signs, emblems or uniforms of the United Nations or of neutral or other States not Parties to the conflict.

And now we see yet another awful consequence of our perfidy. But as Madeline Albright might say, just more collateral damage, and well worth it, eh? Beware, my friends; a hard rain's a-gonna fall… and it will be a toxic one.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer, is a longtime
political reporter for FoxNews.com and
a contributing editor at The American Conservative.
She is also a Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today magazine. Her Twitter account is @KelleyBVlahos.